Two days after Gov. John Hickenlooper said "the time is right" to talk about gun control, a nightmarish mass shooting at a Connecticut elementary school elevated the debate to a new height.

Survivors and families of victims of the tragedies at Columbine High and an Aurora movie theater were building a coalition to push for stricter gun laws even before Friday's massacre of schoolchildren, holding a conference call earlier this week. The latest tragedy, three days after a shooting at a mall in Portland, Ore., intensified their charge.

"Not every bozo should be able to get a gun," said Tom Teves, whose 24-year-old son, Alex, was one of 12 killed in July when a gunman slipped into an Aurora theater during a midnight premiere of "The Dark Knight Rises." "You can't give me a good reason to have an automatic weapon. If you can't shoot a deer with one bullet and kill it, then you're not a sportsman."

Teves, rattled by Friday's horror, asked: If now isn't the day to talk about gun control, then when is?

"When are you, Mr. President, going to do something?" he asked, adding that only people who have lost someone to gun violence are qualified to understand. "Nobody, unless you're in that club, should talk. It's the worst club in the world, and it has the highest dues."

Teves' wife, Caren, sent this tweet Friday: "Mr. President, Congress, WE WANT A SAFER NATION." In an interview, Caren Teves said she was listening when President Barack Obama urged Americans to hold their children a little tighter tonight.

"My child is not here to hug," she said.

Advertisement

Tom Mauser, whose son Daniel died at Columbine in 1999, was part of the conference call that also included six Aurora theater families.

Mauser and others will push for criminal-background checks in private gun sales — ones that take place online or through newspaper ads. While gun stores are required to run such checks, private citizens are not.

They also want stricter laws barring the dangerously mentally ill from buying guns. In most states, including Colorado, only people who have been adjudicated as mentally ill in court are prohibited from purchasing guns. Tougher laws could require psychiatrists, for example, to report people who should not have guns.

"We have people who are very mentally disturbed, but they are not so disturbed as to be prohibited from buying a gun," Mauser said.

Mauser, along with other gun-control advocates, wants Congress to ban assault-style weapons. The gunman in Connecticut had two handguns: a Sig Sauer and a Glock. Found in his car was a Bushmaster .223 M4 carbine, a semi-automatic rifle, police said.

"The pattern in America is we express our condolences and we shake our heads," Mauser said. "Then it's kind of forgotten."

Mauser was in a meeting at work when he received an e-mail about the Connecticut shooting. He opened his computer to a news page and saw the number of dead.

"I just went into shock," he said. "I knew I was going to lose it. I left the meeting, and I went back to my office and cried."

"Four people were set on fire in Denver on Thursday. Should we outlaw lighters?" said Colorado Senate Minority Leader Bill Cadman, a Republican from Colorado Springs.

"What will one, two, five more gun-control laws added to the 50,000 or so we already have nationwide do to prevent more shootings?" asked Rep. Jerry Sonnenberg, R-Sterling.

And state Rep. Bob Gardner of Colorado Springs, a lawyer who will become the ranking Republican on the House Judiciary Committee, said the shooting "becomes really one more really sad and tragic instance where those who are advocating for greater gun control will point to it as the reason we ought to do that.

"I have been concerned that we enact a lot of laws and it really doesn't serve to stop the kinds of tragic and violent incidents that have occurred in Colorado and around the country."

A mass shooting grabs worldwide attention, but what goes unnoticed are the 32 gun murders each day, on average, in the United States, said Brian Malte with the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, based in Washington, D.C.

"Our country is way too lethal when it comes to gun violence," he said.

The Rev. Gil Caldwell, who waited with parents at Columbine 13 years ago, said Colorado should "use the coincidence" of the governor talking about gun control two days before the Connecticut shooting to reignite the discussion.

"But we must not talk with anger, nor engage in the traditional demonizing that too often takes place as we talk about guns and gun control," he said.

One criminologist called for a federal study of mass shootings along the lines of the Secret Service's 2002 "Safe School Initiative," a study of school shootings from 1974 to 2000. The study examined 37 incidents involving 41 student attackers, with the purpose of identifying signs before a shooting occurs.

A study looking at the shootings at Virginia Tech, in Aurora, at the Oak Creek Sikh temple and elsewhere could lead to gun-control measures, said William Woodward, a criminologist at the Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence at the University of Colorado.

Mark Rosenberg, president of the Task Force for Global Health and former director of the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, applauded Hickenlooper and said the conversation must involve people who "are committed to reaching a solution and not committed to defending their position."

Garen Wintemute, director of the Violence Prevention Research Program, said Friday's murders of children at Sandy Hook Elementary "provides an impetus" for gun control. "Today we are seeing it in real time, in videos overhead that include a whole lot of ambulances going home empty because everyone is dead — parents are going home without their kids," he said. "People are reacting not just to Sandy Hook but to the aggregate impact of Oak Creek, Aurora, Blacksburg (Va.) and Littleton.

"In the coming year, we may be willing to have serious discussion about gun policy that we haven't had for many years."

The magnitude of this tragedy makes it difficult to ignore, other experts on gun violence said.

"This, so close on the heels of Aurora, and the victims are such young children — it's going to be hard to do nothing after this," said Kristen Rand, legislative director of the Violence Policy Center in Washington, D.C.